1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems for validating forms and more particularly, to a system and method that validates forms using rules to check data provided on the forms.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
Many businesses process forms to gather information about customers or sales. Each form typically includes multiple data fields. The data is reviewed either manually or by a computerized system. Additional examination may also be performed to confirm that the type of data entered into the fields is correct. For example, a date field should contain an alphanumeric string, while a name field should include only an alphabetic string.
Traditionally, forms are examined using validation statements that are included in the base application program that processes the forms and written in the same language as the application program, for example C or COBOL. All form examinations are included in this base application program. Therefore, when any form examination is added, the base application program must be rewritten, recompiled, and retested. A programmer must enter all rule changes. Therefore, it is desirable to have a system that stores rules separate from the base application program so that a more simple rule language may be used by a non-programmer.
Many current rule systems use a standard Rete algorithm that is not fit to validate rules in parallel due to inherent architecture and processing limitations. The Rete algorithm is described in "Rete: A Fast Algorithm for the Many Pattern/Many Object Pattern Match Problem", Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 19, pp 17-37, 1982. Using the Rete algorithm current rule systems perform rule checks on a form serially and do not verify more than one rule at a time or more than one rule set at a time,
Accordingly, it is desirable to have a system that validates a form using more than one rule in parallel.